I've been seeing a worrying number of these people on Lemmy lately, sharing enlightened takes including but not limited to "voting for Biden is tantamount to fascism" and "the concept of an assigned gender, or even an assigned name, at birth is transphobic" and none of them seem to be interested in reading more than the first sentence of any of my comments before writing a reply.
More often than not they reply with a concern I addressed in the comment they're replying to, without any explanation of why my argument was invalid. Some of them cannot even state their own position, instead simply repeatedly calling mine oppressive in some way.
It occurred to me just now that these interactions reminded me of nothing so much as an evangelical Christian I got into an argument with on Matrix a while ago, in which I met him 95% of the way, conceded that God might well be real and that being trans was sinful and tried to convince him not to tell that to every trans person he passed, and failed. I am 100% convinced he was trolling -- in retrospect I'm pretty sure I could've built a municipal transport system by letting people ride on top of his goalposts (that's what I get for picking a fight with a Christian at 2AM) -- and the only reason I'm not convinced these leftists on Lemmy are trolls is the sheer fucking number of them.
I made this post and what felt like half the responses fell into this category. Am I going insane?
It's of course possible to just be opposed to the meat grinder that is modern society without requiring me to be some kind of revolutionary?
And I would raise the argument that the vast majority of "leftists" are like that and are not actually revolutionary because most people can't be bothered to be revolutionary. It's hard work and even if you succeed, then you have to do more work.
I'm quite happy for a government to exist, I just want it to be a good one. I'm not even asking for a Star Trek utopia, just not actively evil. That'll do for now.
Sure. But people who support the meat grinder will call you one anyway.
Yeah sure but this comment seems to be from the opinion of other "leftists. Although it is actually probably from the perspective of someone who is actually centralist and have just have convinced themselves that they have a political opinion. That way they can look down on everyone and feel smug.
The right are evil, and the left are apparently religious nut jobs. Yay balance.
Centrists will always have some rationale for dismissing anyone to their left. In this case, they have decided to use the idea that pining after instant and poorly considered revolution is common to all leftists, and have used that stereotype to construct this "authoritarian religious nut" narrative, via which they can dismiss anyone who is less than content with the Democratic Party's open hostility to the left.
Hell, just read this thread. It's a veritable bingo card of dismissal excuses.
What I'm after is some consistency. Every time I say "hey I'm a leftist, but I don't think revolution or temporary autocracy would be an improvement over the current system" all I get is ideological gatekeeping, litmus tests and accusations of left punching.
You have to admit, that internet leftism, and Lemmy in particular is heavily biased towards ML philosophy, and they really do not like 20th century revisionism. I just think the world deserves a better class of communist, but apparently that's regarded as wrong think.
Not all revolutionaries are MLs. Have you heard of anarchists or any of the branches of Marxism that aren't Leninists?
All I'm seeing here is a concerted effort to designate .ml as the new "tankie instance" to get world to defederate from.
"I oppose the meat grinder but I still need to crank the handle for a living" is some pretty superficial opposition.
I believe that's basically everyone's position who isn't multi-millionaire.
Also engaging with society is not the same thing as "turning the handle". The only people who think like that are absolutists and they are as unreasonable as the most ravid of Trump supporters. Don't listen to them at all, they have no idea what they're talking about.
Its a bit more layered than that.
Never suggested it was. But the folks who take the most offense inevitable come back with the "My uncle's a police officer and he's not so bad, really" or "Yeah sure I work for Lockhead Martin but we actually help protect a lot of people!"
The internet is rife with folks who simply refuse to see the forest for the trees and cannot imagine being on the receiving end of a system that radiates its worst aspects beyond the borders.
You know, I'm old enough to remember the pandemic, when folks who were asked to wear masks and get vaccines would scream "Authoritarian!" and "Absolutist!" and "Religious Zealot!" at everyone from the head of the CDC on down to the guy delivering them french fries. I never got to hear it used against proponents of the Iraq War, back when "You're either with us or you're with the Terrorists!" though.
The term has a peculiar usage, in my experience.
But there are still police officers and defense workers under communism. The regimes that MLs so vehemently defend have plenty of these things.
Everyone agrees that we should work towards a world where we don't need such things, but the popular idea that this kind of thing is bad in the US, but good in China/Russia is blatant hypocrisy.
I would say anarchists don't support these things, and there are as many of them as there are MLs on here.
Although it's MLs building things like Unions that try to improve current society.
There is a fundamental difference between an agency that grew out of a local liberation effort and one that inherited the legacy of 19th century run away slave catchers.
Consider the shocking rise in incarceration in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the habit of cops living a city away driving in to police minority neighborhoods devoid of democratic governance, and the huge profit margins police privatization enjoys.
The profit motive amplifies all the worst aspects of the police state
See, that's usually where the core political differences start to rear their head. The sort of like, revolutionary leftist, being so swamped in the failures of modern government, begins to see everything through this lens. Ahh, we need to replace the whole system, because any attempt to make it better is inevitably met with failure. It's relatively easy to feel totally hopeless if you start to grasp, say, the history of civil rights, right. Fight for equal voting, fight to eliminate lynchings, fight for equal economic access. But then we see white flight take place, we see redlining take place, we see the public pools get closed down and we still see huge enclaves and ghettos exist with lack of economic access, a school to prison pipeline, an inability for prisoners to vote, an a specific carve out in the constitution for slavery to basically be legal as long as it's only done with prisoners. Because you're so focused on how everything could be improved, it begins to feel as though everything is still a total failure.
I dunno. I do just kind of buy into dual power, so it's not a problem for me at all and this divide doesn't really exist, but that's where that kind of like, hopeless put upon revolutionary perspective comes from.